These two videos offer a brief insight into 4 years of Hartmut Veit’s socially-engaged art enquiry into the politics of coal, space and place in the Latrobe Valley – starting with the Hazelwood Coal mine fire in 2014 and ending in 2018, a year after the closure of the Hazelwood power station in 2017.
During these years Hartmut Veit investigated the complex web of social and political changes affecting local communities in transition from the impact of the Hazelwood mime fire and subsequent closure of coal-fired power stations in the Latrobe Valley. Working deeply embedded with the local community his art practice uses coal as an artistic medium to demonstrate coal’s material agency in shaping experience, relations and discourse.